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Monday, April 9, 2012

Easter Dresses

Edited: This is the look I'm using for Project Run and Play's final week of Signature Look. Really anything I made in the past couple of weeks could have fit the bill. However, seeing as the last week coincides with the last week of school for us, I planned my Easter dresses on being my signature look.

What makes them me you ask? Clean simple lines, nothing too bold or bright, simple details, reusing and re-purposing material and it comes in 2--a necessity when you have two opinionated girls.

I present My Signature Look:

I did it! Two Easter dresses done in time to wear to church on Easter Sunday. That doesn't happen very often. Thank goodness for 1pm church time, because Clara's dress was sewn up on Sunday morning:) We got up to do Easter with my husband before he left for the hospital at 6am, so I had a lot of time to kill.

Here they are: Dress #1--A complete Sally creation which means no patterns. A lot of the details came from ideas I've seen around, but when it came to making it, I just measured and cut out. It's an A-line dress with petal sleeves and a belt.

When I cut out the front, I added 4 inches to account for the fact that I wanted to do the pleats at the neck line. Each pleat is 1/2 inch, so you double that. I tacked the pleats down to hold in the ric rac. I put fray check at the bottom of the ric rac in the pleats to keep it from fraying, seeing as it is just secured with the stitching on the pleat.

I love how the sleeves turned out. I just took my basic sleeve pattern that I sketched out and when I cut it out just curved up about 2/3rds of the way, cutting 2 pieces for each sleeve. Make sure when cutting that they end up opposites. I added the homemade bias tape and ric rac before I added the sleeves. I also basted them together before I sewed them on to the dress.

As for the belt, I just created a tube, stitched on the ric rac, flipped in the ends and added some hooks and eyes for fasteners. I had contemplated doing buttons, but I wanted something a little more simple and stream lined since the dress already had so much detail.

The main floral fabric came from JoAnne's and the green is a reuse of a former project.

Dress #2--Kind of a re-purpose of some sorts. I knew I only had enough fabric from the original floral to get a skirt and maybe some sleeves if I was lucky. I never really intended to make a second dress or I would have bought more--the second daughter has more dresses than she needs and I was just going to let her choose one to wear on Easter. She however, loved the fabric and begged for a dress too.

Since I went with the green and navy blue for the first dress as accent colors, I chose to go with gray and robin's egg blue for this one. Problem was the color of gray I wanted was not to be had at the fabric store (at least in some kind of cotton--I did find it in the fancy section). My husband had a shirt that would have worked perfectly and I didn't think he would mind letting me cut up, because he had bought it for a dollar in Africa when he needed a short sleeve button up shirt. However, it had some sentimentality attached to it (go figure) and he didn't want to donate to the cause. When I couldn't find fabric at the fabric store and he wouldn't let me have the shirt, I decided to go to Good Will and get another shirt. The advantage of using an old men's shirt you ask--no sewing a placket (that thing where the buttons go). You just use the one from the shirt.

For the basic shape of the dress I used the Oliver & S Jump Rope dress pattern. I used the bodice piece to cut up the shirt, taking into account that I already had a placket in place, the collar and the sash. The sleeves came kind of from another pattern, but it was a 2T size so I made them bigger. I just wanted a sleeve that was gathered at the top and the bottom, because I wanted to use the blue at the bottom of the sleeve as well. For the skirt I just cut out 2 panels as big as I could from the fabric I had left. This dress came together in a couple of hours on Sunday morning, while my kids played happily together in their sugar highs from Easter candy. However, I was kind of rushing and didn't pause to think when I was doing the cutting. Can you guess what bugs me?

The one sleeve is cut the wrong way when it comes to the pattern of the fabric. Oh well. They say the Amish put a little mistake in the quilts they make as their "signature" so this can by my signature.